Once as a boy, I worked the roots of a handful loose from the rocky soil across the gravel roadrunning in front of my houseand brought them to my mother's flower garden.

With all the care a ten year old could muster,I replanted the firebetween petunias and four o'clocks.There, among the tame flowers soon they perished.

“They grow wild; that's just how some thingsare meant to be,” Momma saidas she watered her carefully tended bedsin the summer heat.

But alwaysbefore she'd go back inside,she'd walk to the edge of our yardand look across the dusty roadat the red-orange blanketcovering the rough groundburning in the last light of day.

The poem "Indian Painbrushes" first appearsin Native Son and again inI Come from Cowboys... and Indians . It was a second place winner in the 2007 Grandmother Earth National Environmental Writing Awards.

Momma with her flowers at our house in Durant, Oklahoma 1984

The Coast of Oklahoma

Outside my western window,a grey day presses against the pane,remnant of a fading hurricane flown inland,to die on the coast of Oklahoma.

Scanning the receding mist,I hold a lawman’s star in my left handa remnant of hard arms and a good man’s heart.Your cowboy hat hangsunder rifles on a red cedar gun rack as if you might walk inand put it on.

But August has slipped away while I wasn’t looking,blue eyes beneath a tilted brim.

So, I search the ground below the weeping glass, seeking the scuffsof your well-worn heels on September dirt.

Where fathers walk sign is always leftand sometimes, only a tracker can readthose marks.

I need that trail now,for without a path to follow,life can be a pursuit of pieces, scattered in a storm a whisper of dry leaves whirling away before the rain begins to fall.

The poem, "Night" won first place in the long unrhymed poetry category of the 2008 Oklahoma Writer's Federation, Inc contest.

It also is published in I Come from Cowboys...

Night

I am born into the nightwith a flickering tongue of lightningmiles awayand thunder so low it almost goes unnoticedbehind the distant scent of rain.

The air around me remains unlitby the fire of yellow bulbs. I have chosenthe dark instead,letting it wrap me in its musicno guitar’s acoustic rhythmic strumming,only tree frogs and a coyote singinga dying summer.

Drifting among the elms, a breeze finds me,touches my skin and moves onlike a lover slipping into shadowsbeneath pitch black September leaves, blackerstill than the sky they press against.

I wish to be assimilated into the living blood of night,inhaled with ink black airand breathed across the sky,my thoughts dripping from branches,my eyes opening in the face of a great horned owlabout to fly.

Below:"The Coast of Oklahoma" was written for my father; it won Songs of Eretz 2017 Poetry contest $1000 prize. Songs of Eretz is a great poetry site. I highly recommend it.

The poem "Renegade" first appeared in Red River Review and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016

Behind him,the sky is wearing bones a line of leafless sycamoresetched against the greying dayin a time of outlaws.

Well aware the cold is on his heels,he watches as a rising crescent moonlifts the blackabove not yet winter hills,cocks the hammer back and buries the world under collapsing stars.

"Fly Fishing on Blue River" was written for my big brother. It was a runner up in the 2016 Songs of Eretz Awards and first appeared in Oklahoma Today Magazine.

Fly Fishing on Blue River (For Floyd)

Stars and stonesmark the tattered edges of the world.Two brown troutheavy in your wicker creel,the air is slowly cooling. But you’ve moved on,wading into the sleepy currentmending the lineas the day falls,fire, lighting on dark ripples like a dance of dragonfliesburning Blue River,black and yellow,your fly rod whipping a whispered cast into the setting sunhaloing your silhouette,goldenagainst the coming of night on the water. One more cast,a hand-tied lure arcs outfrom the rocksthrough scattered sunset shadows and is gone.